Beekeeping on the island of Newfoundland.

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Pulling a Queen Cage

We recently added three mated queens to some of our hives and splits. Here’s a quick video of us checking to see if a queen was released from her cage. The video ends with us looking at some foundationless frames in a honey super.

I didn’t post a video or photos of the actual requeening because we posted an instructive video of a requeening last year. You can watch it on YouTube if you like and then follow the link back to Mud Songs to read the original post for more detailed info. Here’s a semi-short story about requeening, Part 1: The candy plug in one of our queen cages was rock solid and the bees hadn’t eaten through it five days later when we checked on it, not even close. To prevent that from happening, we might spray the candy plug with some water before we install the next queen cage. I’m not sure if that’s recommended by the experts, but we rarely get consistent advice from the experts, anyway, so we’ll probably do it. Part 2: We’ve been told that the attendant bees should be removed from the queen cage before the cage is installed. Supposedly in the commotion of being introduced, the attendant bees can get over excited and inadvertently sting or harm the queen. We’ve also been told not to worry about the attendant bees and just leave them in the cage with the queen. So that’s what we did and everything turned out fine.

P.S. (July 19/12): We might not spray the candy plug after all. Read the comments for more details.

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3 thoughts on “Pulling a Queen Cage”

…planning to set up a couple hives of our next spring. Came across your site a couple weeks ago and look forward to dropping in as often as I can. The experience will be a bit different here in Ontario’s far south but I appreciate the “pioneer” spirit of Mud Songs. Much success and happy anniversary.